{"id":499875,"date":"2010-04-01T10:01:14","date_gmt":"2010-04-01T14:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"tag:www.economist.com,21005783"},"modified":"2010-04-01T10:01:14","modified_gmt":"2010-04-01T14:01:14","slug":"drill-maybe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/499875","title":{"rendered":"Drill, maybe"},"content":{"rendered":"

YESTERDAY, Barack Obama announced a proposal to open parts of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and the north coast of Alaska, to offshore oil drilling. Environmental journalist David Roberts laid out<\/a> a typical political criticism of the policy:<\/p>\n

\n

The most important thing to understand about President Obama\u2019s announcement on offshore drilling is that it\u2019s mostly for show. Its intended effects are political \u2014 corralling more Senate votes for a climate bill and defusing anticipated voter anger over gas price spikes. Even on those grounds, however, it\u2019s unlikely to succeed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Mr Roberts goes on to point out that the oil from these areas won’t amount to much in the scheme of things; certainly, it will be too little to have much of an effect on American oil imports or on global oil prices (or domestic petrol prices). Accordingly, it won’t much blunt criticisms of the administration this summer, should petrol prices rise as anticipated. And as Mr Roberts says, a bargaining chip isn’t much of a bargaining chip if it’s played pre-emptively.<\/p>\n

These criticisms only make sense if you assume that the president and his staff aren’t very smart. It would make sense to hold this chip in reserve if you could expect to get something meaningful for it, but as Mr Roberts himself argues elsewhere<\/a>, the Republicans have found an effective strategy in blanket opposition to everything. If you can’t expect to get anything for it, then it’s not much of a bargaining chip. Mr Roberts is correct that this won’t stop Republicans from complaining that he should do more on drilling, but it’s much more difficult to rile up audiences by saying the president has opened an insufficient amount of territory to drilling than by saying he refuses to allow any new drilling.<\/p>\n

It seems to me that Mr Obama concluded that there probably wasn’t much political gain to be had from holding out on this, and that taking the decision probably makes sense on its own terms. Just as the drilling won’t produce enough oil to shift oil costs, it also won’t lower costs enough to shift oil demand noticeably, in a fashion counterproductive to greening of the economy. The American government can expect to raise revenue from this measure by selling leases to the opened areas. And oil continues to be a valuable commodity. If the decision makes sense on its own terms and has limited political impact, why not do it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

YESTERDAY, Barack Obama announced a proposal to open parts of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and the north coast of Alaska, to offshore oil drilling. Environmental journalist David Roberts laid out a typical political criticism of the policy: The most important thing to understand about President Obama\u2019s announcement on offshore drilling is that it\u2019s mostly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-499875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499875\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}